The National Fire Protection Association (NFPA), in “Smoke Alarms in U.S. Home Fires” (2011), and the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), in “Smoke Detector Operability Survey Report” (1994) have reported that, although nearly all U.S. residences have smoke detectors installed at any given time, approximately 20% are not functioning. Moreover, most of these aren't functioning because residents have removed the batteries in order to silence nuisance alarms. Nuisance alarms include any false hazard alarm which is not triggered by an actual hazard, such as those smoke alarms caused by smoke from non-hazardous cooking activities, or shower mist, for example. Nuisance alarms also include any routine maintenance warning that inconveniences a resident, such as a low-battery warning that is sounded while a resident is sleeping. Much prior work on this topic has focused on the prevention of false hazard alarms.
I believe that most nuisance alarms are actually low-battery warnings, and that most users disable hazard detectors because a low-battery warning has interrupted someone's sleep. This is certainly true at my residence, and I believe that it is likely true elsewhere, for the following two reasons.
First, although only some small fraction of properly installed hazard detectors will ever issue a false hazard alarm, every single installed hazard detector that uses a battery will eventually produce a low-battery warning if its battery is not replaced before it gets weak. Although there have been recent campaigns to encourage residents to change batteries on a regular schedule, it seems likely that only some small fraction of users actually do this fastidiously. To put this in perspective, even if we generously estimate that an unrealistically high percentage of users, say 70%, fastidiously changes batteries on a predetermined schedule, the remaining 30% of the installed detectors will eventually issue a low-battery warning. Since the installed base of battery-operated or battery-backed detectors in the US is on the order of 100 million units, with a typical battery life of one year, we may calculate that there will be about 30 million low-battery warnings sounded in the US each year. Any of these low-battery warnings that happen to awaken residents from their sleep is likely to result in the immediate and indefinite disabling of the detector.
Second, I believe that there is a pronounced and unfortunate tendency for these 30 million low-battery warnings to be sounded at night, when most, albeit not all, residents are asleep. The likely reason, quite apart from Murphy's Law, as Bergman pointed out in U.S. Pat. No. 5,686,896 (1997), is that residences tend to be cooler at night. Also since battery voltages drop at lower temperatures, the low-battery warning is consequently more likely to be sounded at night. Again, I believe that a typical resident will deal with these late-night low-battery warnings by un-mounting the detector and/or forcefully removing its batteries, throwing the detector somewhere to be handled later, at some more convenient time, and then going back to bed. Moreover, it is likely that many residents, after haven been awakened by hazard detectors one or more times, will have serious misgivings about ever returning the detectors to service.
The above two reasons also seem plausible after consideration of the responses given to survey questions in the previously mentioned consumer survey conducted by the CPSC.
Hence, there are a lot of low-battery warnings and they often cause an infuriating inconvenience. Even worse, they often constitute a significant threat to health, safety, and property, because they likely often lead to the immediate and indefinite disabling of the hazard detector.
In contrast, I believe that if a low-battery warning is noticed by a resident during normal waking hours, it is much more likely that he or she will calmly take a minute to resolve the issue immediately by replacing the battery and restoring the hazard detector to service.
Since this scenario unfolds perhaps 30 million times per year or more in the US alone, it seems prudent to shift the odds in favor of convenience and, consequently, to enhance consumer safety.